On Bacon’s Rebellion, Barnie Day writes:
I was in the gift shop at Monticello today and could not find one item made in the U. S. Not one. And I spent nearly an hour looking. Even the quill pens and the Houdin bust replicas are made in Taiwan or China. And now we’ve passed CAFTA? (No, I didn’t spend a dime. I was tempted–those quills were nice ones.)
Ain’t that a damned shame?
Our company here in Madison used to make wreaths for the monticello catalog. I appreciated the business that lasted for several years. I understand that the Foundation was often at loggerheads with the catalog because they were not “authenic” enough. Our last wreath for the catalog was made of flowers that could have been grown at Monticello. I don’t know what happened to the catalog, but it seems surprising that the shop is now all China all the time. I thought the Foundation had more control over its own shop.
Of course, if Barnie Day had actually paid attention or taken a macroeconomics class, he’d know that international trade is beneficial to both countries, and would also know why the US has lowered production of those types of goods, instead trading with countries like China and Taiwan to get them. :D
Genevieve, they do in fact, teach macroeconomis, at Duke’s Fuqua
School and I paid rapt attention when I was there (MBA 1991). Among
the things I learned: in the abstract, truly free trade, like water
responding unobstructed to gravity, will find equilibrium at its
LOWEST point, in that standards of living between two hypothetical
trading countries will be lowered in the high standard country,
and raised in the low standard one; and (2) in the event of a government
presence, free trade exists only in the abstract. The reality is that
government policies tweak the process in a manner that creates winners
and losers different than the winners and losers that would otherwise be
produced in a ‘free’ environment. This notion that everyone should plat to their strengths, what the B-schools call ‘competitive advantage’–seems an
elegant and appealing one, but it works best on paper. It is skewed, even warped by government policy, and sometimes torn asunder by leaps in technology. We are in the Petroleum Age now. I don’t know what’s next, but I suspect hydrogen. I do know this: the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone. The next leap will set the trading table for dinner guests unknown to us at the moment.
Genevieve,
You could say the same thing about competition between species for a given territory. Yes, it can be ‘good’ for each species as a whole in that over time it leads to selection of the fittest, strongest examples of each for survival. Those traits will then dominate. Unless of course you are on the side of one species or another and have a concern about the well-being of individual members of that species that are being threatened. Then it’s a different matter.
I guess that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats picked a side – America. We don’t much give a damn about acheiving some abstract ideal of natural economic balance. We’ve taken the side of America and we are in favor of skewing the whole system in America’s favor from the get-go. We are unabashedly patriotic and we put that patriotism ahead of any abstract ideas about organizing society and the economy, be it through the lens of Marx or Friedman.
What I don’t understand is what business anybody has in directing American trade policy if they aren’t 100% on America’s side.